Conflicts of Interest

Here's an interesting conflict situation from San Mateo County, CA. According to an article in yesterday's Almanac, prosecutors are investigating the selection by two school boards of a project architect for construction projects at the same time that the project architect was remodeling the house …

I want to revisit a situation I mentioned a few days ago in a post about ethics reform. Common Cause Rhode Island was recommending a reform to deal with the situation where gifts are made to officials by an organization that is not an "interested party" (and therefore not subject to the gift ban) b…

Imagine that you're a county supervisor with a $92,000 salary and, despite the salary, you're allowed to hold an outside job (because the county supervisors before you gave you, and themselves, this opportunity). With a sizeable salary, there would appear to be no reason to work in any field that w…

University of Maryland Law School professor Deborah Hellman recently put the draft of her law review article, "Defining Corruption and Constitutionalizing Democracy" (forth. Mich. L. Rev (Vol. 111)), on SSRN. The core argument of her paper is that defining legislative corruption requires a theory o…

Here's an interesting conflict situation out of Forsyth County, Georgia. According to an article in the Forsyth News, a county commissioner owns a company that buys county water and sells it to county residents who used to have wells. The company owns the infrastructure that supplies water to four …

Here's an interesting conflict question. According to an article in the Tewksbury Patch this week, a special town meeting in Tewksbury, MA will soon vote on whether to go to referendum on the question of replacing the town meeting with a council. The question is whether the elected town meeting mod…

An excellent article on the front page of last Sunday's New York Times looks at a proposal by the federal Office of Governmental Ethics (OGE) to limit two exceptions to the prohibition on accepting gifts from lobbyists:  the "widely-attended gathering" (WAG) exception and the "social invitations" e…

It's amazing the lengths people will go to when they are accused of bribery. Take Zehy Jereis, a former Yonkers, NY party chair who gave nearly $175,000 to a Yonkers council member, and is being accused of doing this in order to get her to make a pivotal vote in favor of his client's controversial …

Newspapers aren't called the fourth estate for nothing. But in cities these days, they are more like the third estate, more important, that is, than the clergy. In fact, their investigations and editorials can bring down mayors, council presidents, even parties. Local dailies may be losing money ha…

As I near the end of writing my local government ethics book, I am going over local government ethics codes looking for unusual, but valuable provisions to include in a special section that follows my discussion of the run-of-the-mill provisions. I would like to share one of these provisions that i…